20620670

Seeing Japan, Imagining Poland: Polish Art and the Russo-Japanese War
Author(s): David Crowley

Source: The Russian Review, Vol. 67, No. 1 (Jan., 2008), pp. 50-69
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Seeing Japan, Imagining Poland:
Polish Art and the
Russo-Japanese War
DAVID CROWLEY
On first inspection it seems unlikely that the interests of Polish artists and writers in
Japan at the beginning of the twentieth century?the theme of this essay?could be anything
more than the subject of a minor footnote in the history of either country. Living as subjects
of three aggressive empires that had partitioned the nation over a century earlier, the Polish
intelligentsia was remarkably introspective. The widespread desire for national
independence from Russian, German, and Austrian rule overshadowed most aspects of
national culture. Art and literature in the late nineteenth century were weighed on Polish
scales: a poem or a painting was most highly valued if it captured national hopes or anguish.
Patriotic writers and painters were claimed as the authentic voice of a nation silenced by
injustice.1 Polonocentrism was not, of course, limited to art: historians raked over past
events in order to find explanations of the misfortunes endured in the present.2 National
messianists, sharing a vision shaped by the poet Adam Mickiewicz in the mid century,
claimed that the wrongs done to the nation would eventually be corrected by natural laws
of justice and that Poland, like Christ, would arise again. Others saw the causes for the loss
of sovereignty in terms of national failings; not least in the anarchic system of government
known as the "golden freedom" (zlota wolnoic) which had operated during the sixteenth
and seventeenth-century Commonwealth. The Poles could not, however, be accused of
ignorance or indifference to present events abroad. Contemporary political dramas in Berlin,
St. Petersburg, Vienna, or elsewhere on the international stage were invariably weighed up
in terms of their impact on "the Polish question." From the Polish perspective, Russia's
war with Japan in 1904-5 and the turmoil which followed it throughout Vistula Country
(Privislinskii Krai / Kraj PrzywiSlahski), as Russian Poland was known, was perhaps the
'On the relations between Polish nationalism and modern art see Waldemar Okori, Alegorie narodowie:
Studia z dziej?w sztuki polskiej XIX wieku (Wroclaw, 1992); Jan Cavanaugh, Out Looking In: Early Modern
Polish Art, 1890-1918 (Berkeley, 2000); Anna Brzyski, "Between the Nation and the World: Nationalism and
Emergence of Polish Modern Art," Centropa 1 (September 2001): 165-79.
2For discussions of nineteenth-century historiography regarding Poland see Andrzej Walicki, Philosophy
and Romantic Nationalism: The Case of Poland (Oxford, 1982); and Jerzy Jedlicki, A Suburb of Europe:
Nineteenth-Century Polish Approaches to Western Civilization (Budapest, 1998).
The Russian Review 67 (January 2008): 50-69

Copyright 2008 The Russian Review
Polish Art and the Russo-Japanese War 51
most important of these gauges of fate in the fifty-year period between the failed November
Uprising of 1863 and the outbreak of the First World War. While the impact of the Russo
Japanese War on Polish political activity at the turn of the century is well debated,
its bearing in the wider fields of cultural life is less studied.3 In this essay I explore not
only how the Japanese attack was claimed as a model for Polish militancy but also for
Polish art.
Japonisme?the West's adoption of the themes and the techniques of the art of Japan?
has conventionally been viewed as the invention of the avant-garde of 1860s in London,
Paris, and Munich which passed into popularity in the 1890s. The specialist interests of an
elite group of aesthetes like James McNeil Whistler and the Goncourt brothers spread into
popular taste, becoming a home decorating style and the theme of popular operettas by
Gilbert and Sullivan. Understood in terms of aesthetics and fashion, Europe's fascination
with Japan appears chimerical. As Oscar Wilde famously proclaimed in 1889, "the whole
of Japan is a pure invention.... The Japanese people are simply a mode of style, an exquisite
fancy of art."4 And like all fashions, Japonisme was destined to become demode.
It would seem that the story of Polish Japonisme mirrors that of the phenomenon
elsewhere in Europe: artists had joined the pan-European fashion for Japanese motifs, filling
their paintings with oriental "props" such as fans, kimonos, and blue-and-white china from
the early 1880s.5 By 1897, Stanislaw Wyspianski, a symbolist artist to whom we will
return, expressed his contempt for artists who littered their works with exhibits from
"Japanese and Chinese Museums." They could not, in his view, "make something new"?
the vital quotient of modern art?from such sources.6 Moreover, in the Polish context,
Japanese art lacked the vital national qualities to be valued positively. In 1901, for instance,
collector Feliks Jasienski offered to give a large number of fine ukiyoe prints to Zach^ta,
the Society for the Encouragement of the Fine Arts (Towarzystwo Zach^ty Sztuk Pieknych)
in Warsaw, a body which claimed a role in the promotion of national culture. He was
publicly and vigorously rejected. He received anonymous letters, one demanding that he
"take your eyesores somewhere else and go back to where you came from. Develop the
taste of the Papuans and not the Varsovians."7 Reacting to this slight, Jasienski moved to
liberal Krakow, an Austrian-ruled city which laid claim to be the cultural capital of Poland
and was the center of what the Poles call "Modernizm" (that is, broadly, Art Nouveau and
3See Stanislaw Kalabinski and Feliks Tych, Czwarte powstanie czy pierwsza rewolucja? Lata 1905-1907
na ziemiach polskich (Warsaw, 1976); Leszek JaSkiewicz, Przemiany ustrojowe w cesarstwie rosyjskim w
okresie rewolucji 1905-1907 (Warsaw, 1980); idem, Absolutyzm rosyjski w dobie rewolucji 1905-1907 (Warsaw,
1982); and Robert E. Blobaum, Rewolucja: Russian Poland, 1904-1917 (Ithaca, 1996).
4Oscar Wilde, "The Decay of Lying" (January 1889), in his De Profundis and Other Writings (Harmondsworth,
1986), 82.
5For general studies of Japonisme see Lionel Lambourne, Japonisme: Cultural Crossings between Japan
and the West (London, 2005); Toshio Watanabe, High Victorian Japonisme (New York, 1991); Aichi-ken
Bijutsukan et al., Japonisme in Vienna (Tokyo, 1994); and Ayako Ono, Japonisme in Britain: Whistler, Menpes,
Henry, Hornel and Nineteenth-Century Japan (London, 2003). The best source on the phenomenon in Polish
culture remains Lukasz Kossokowski, ed., Inspiracje Sztukq Japonii w malarstwie i grafice polskich
modernist?w (Krakow, 1981).
6Letter to Lucjan Rydel, January 19, 1897, in Leon Ploszewski and Maria Rydlowa, eds., Listy Stanislawa
Wyspianskiego do Lucjana Rydla II (Krakow, 1979), 421.
7Cited in Manggha: Wystawa kolekcji Feliksa Mangghi Jasienskiego (Krakow, n.d.), 10.
52 David Crowley
symbolist works of art, literature, and even architecture). The xenophobia and chauvinism
which characterized Warsaw's rejection was perhaps only an exaggerated expression of
prejudices which might be expressed by narrow minds elsewhere in Europe. Nevertheless
circumstances changed dramatically within a few years and, as I will show, Poles came to
imagine themselves as natural allies of Japan in their mutual struggle with Russia.
Fig. 1 J?zef Mehoffer, Europa Jubilans, oil painting, 1905 (courtesy of the Lviv Painting Gallery).
In 1905 J?zef Mehoffer painted Europa Jubilans, a work of art which ostensibly might
look like a pale echo of the "first wave" of European Japonisme of the 1860s and the 1870s
(fig. 1). In this light it can be seen as a little more than a late work in an important "genre"
within European Japonisme, that of orientalist works which exoticize European women by
a making a connection with the material culture of Japan. In this artistic idiom, both become
trophies. Mehoffer's wife, Jadwiga, described the painting:
In the interior of a private museum containing a valuable collection of a lover of

Japanese art... with a menacing statue of Buddha and ranked series of majolica
figures, a table is covered with an Indian shawl. Europa sprawls, flanked between
steel armour, and a dragon in the shadows with a glittering vicious tail.8
Despite the clarity of her description, the meaning of this work remains troublingly
ambiguous and, as one commentator noted, perhaps lies hidden in the unsettling relationship
between the arrogant title and the unsettling scene. "Why," asked Marcin Samlicki in
1912, "is this colorful work depicting a dapper chambermaid, resting on an Eastern shawl
Madwiga Mehoffer, cited by Kossokowski, Inspiracje Sztukq Japonii (n,p.).
after cleaning a room cluttered with chinoiserie (chinszczyzna) and japonaiserie

(japonszczyzna), titled with such high pride?"9 In order to make sense of this charged work
and of the wider revival of Japonisme in Polish culture of which this work is an important
example, we need to turn our attention to the events of the Russo-Japanese war.
The unexpected attack by the Japanese on the Russian fleet in Port Arthur in Manchuria
in February 1904 raised high hopes many thousands of miles away, not least on Russia's
Western fringes. Finland, for instance, a semiautonomous corner of empire for much of the
nineteenth century, was radicalized as different strata of society reacted to the increasing
severity of Nicholas IPs rule. 1905 saw an unprecedented wave of antigovernment
demonstrations in Helsinki. "The deepening of the Russian foreign and domestic political
crisis was," Antii Kujala observed, "an essential ingredient in the development of events in
Finland, since the Finns alone would not have challenged the government."10 The Poles
were, as the uprisings of 1830 and 1863 demonstrated, rather more militant. In fact, the
heightened tensions released by war in the East, coupled with social tensions at home,
brought the Poles' loyalty to the empire under even greater suspicion. According to Charles
Steinwedel "Being Polish or Jewish" in the eyes of loyalists "no longer simply meant that
one would not support orthodoxy, but that one sought to separate from the empire, thus
destroying it."11 This perception?though exaggerated?was perhaps not incorrect. Always
looking for signs of weakness in the sprawling Russian Empire, Polish militants were
exhilarated by the challenge issued by Japan to what they took to be a common enemy. In
the eighteen months of war that followed, public opinion was stirred by the fact that Poles,
as subjects of the tsar, were serving and dying in the East, a sense amplified by a view that
Poles were disproportionately represented in the Russian army and navy. Official attempts
to raise support for the Russian forces in the Far East were seized as opportunities for
resistance. In the first weeks after the attack on Port Arthur, for instance, Polish activists
disrupted theatre performances orchestrated in Radom to raise funds for the war effort,
while students in Warsaw refused to participate in progovernment demonstrations. Only
the most loyal Warsaw conservatives were prepared to commit support to the Russian war
effort by calling for funds for a Catholic Hospital train to serve in Manchuria, a gesture
which provoked clandestine attacks on their homes.12 In April 1904 shots fired into an
antiwar demonstration in Warsaw had the powerful effect of creating a sense of victimhood.
And in the months that followed?a period that saw a steady series of Japanese victories in
the Far East and economic recession at home?Russian Poland witnessed many boycotts,
strikes, demonstrations, and assassination attempts on figures associated with tsarist
power (fig. 2). These events culminated in acts of dissent by workers, students, and the
poor. On November 13, Warsaw's Grzybowski Square was the site of gun battle between
the Russian police and Polish fighters. Six were killed and many hundreds arrested. Polish
9Marcin Samlicki, "J?zef Mehoffer," in Teksty o Malarzach 1890-1918 (Wroclaw, 1976), 381.
10Antti Kujala, "Finland in 1905: The Political and Social History of the Revolution," in The Russian
Revolution of 1905. Centenary Perspectives, ed. Jonathan D. Smele and Anthony Heywood (London, 2005),
89.
11 Charles Steinwedel, "The 1905 Revolution in Ufa: Mass Politics, Elections, and Nationality," Russian
Review 59 (October 2000): 575.
12Blobaum, Rewolucja, 45.
54 David Crowley
protestors made a direct connection between their cause and the Japanese interests. Socialist
activist Boleslaw Berger adopted the pseudonym "Kuroki" in tribute to Count Tamesada
Kuroki, Commander in Chief of the Japanese First Army and victor of the Battle of the Yalu
River at the beginning of May 1904, and marchers on Warsaw's streets shouted "banzai!"
(as did Polish reservists in the Russian army on the way to the front in an aborted revolt).13
Fig. 2 "National march" by Poles in Warsaw, November 5, 1905. This demonstration

culminated at the foot of the statue to Adam Mickiewicz, erected seven years earlier, on Krakowskie
Przedmiescie, where Henryk Sienkiewicz delivered a speech to the crowd (private collection).
Events on Grzybowski Square and three months later on Bloody Sunday in St. Petersburg
were followed by a widespread school strike. Children and teachers boycotted classes to
protest at the suppression of the Polish language, a long-standing focus of anger (a boycott
that continued sporadically until 1914). A General Strike called in February 1905 saw four
hundred thousand workers withhold their labor for as long as four weeks. This, in turn, was
followed by numerous spontaneous strikes. In May tensions in the factories gave way to
violent disorder on the streets. Rioting in Warsaw was met with swift and violent reaction
from the Russian authorities.
Throughout this period of crisis, clandestine political parties vied with one another to
lead a society on the brink of insurrection. The Left?already fractured into camps that
reflected the national division of Poland and prone to schism?was divided over the correct
course to follow. Should it encourage popular nationalism or international solidarity? The
13Kalabinski and Tych, Czwarte powstanie czy pierwsza rewolucja? 55.
socialist and internationalist activist Rosa Luxemburg, writing in Le Socialiste, stressed the
international dimensions of the Russo-Japanese War:
The Russo-Japanese War now gives to all an awareness that even war and peace
in Europe?its destiny?isn't decided between the four walls of the European
concert, but outside it, in the gigantic maelstrom of world and colonial politics....
This war brings the gaze of the international proletariat back to the great political
and economic connectedness of the world, and violently dissipates in our ranks
the particularism, the pettiness of ideas that form in any period of political calm.14
What this conflict demonstrated, for Luxemburg, was the interconnectedness of a world
shaped by imperialism. Workers and peasants were pitched against one another; their
solidarity shattered by nationalism and their common interests masked by a divisive
ideology.15 In sharp contrast, pragmatic, indurate voices on the Polish left claimed that its
only chance of achieving the support of the nation was to don the clothes of nationalism.
The older leadership ranks of the Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna, or
PPS)?known as the "Old Guard" (Starzy)?imagined the conflict in the Far East escalating
into a European war which would create opportunities to seize independence. As historian
Robert Blobaum puts it, "by supporting the Japanese side, the Starzy intended to give
history a push while gaining an ally for its efforts to resurrect an independent Polish state."16
In July 1904, J?zef Pilsudski, a PPS leader who was to become the central figure in
national life after 1918, went on a clandestine mission to Tokyo to secure funds to finance
a Polish legion to fight Russia (a trip concealed from some in the PPS leadership because it
was likely to exacerbate differences within the party between militant "patriotic" and
"internationalist" socialist factions). The Japanese authorities were interested in the Poles'
capacity to provide intelligence about the Russian army and to disrupt the supply lines to
the East (Pilsudski offered to attack the Trans-Siberian Railway). In one of the strangest
coincidences of Polish political history, Pilsudski met Roman Dmowski by chance on the
street in Tokyo on July 11, 1904. Dmowski, leader of the National-Democratic Party
(Stronnictwo Narodowo-Demokratyczne), which took a right-wing nationalist view of Polish
interests, had travelled to Tokyo to dissuade the Japanese authorities from supporting
insurrection in Russian Poland.17 He argued that the PPS forces?a few hundred men on
horseback armed with rifles?were too weak to succeed and that the Russian response
would be bloody. Dmowski's arguments appear to have won the day, and the results of
Pilsudski's mission were relatively modest: Japanese officers attached to the embassy in
Paris began to give bomb-making lessons to Polish socialists.18 According to Blobaum,
14Rosa Luxemburg, "In the Storm" Le Socialiste (May 1-8, 1904), archived at http://www.marxists.org (last
accessed August 21, 2006).
,5For Luxemburg's views on the so-called Polish question see Horace B. Davis, ed., The National Question:
Selected Writings by Rosa Luxemburg (New York, 1976), 60-100.
17Ewa Palasz-Rutkowska, "Historia stosunk?w polsko-japofiskich 1904-1915," in Historia stosunk?w polsko
japonskich 1904-1945, ed. Ewa Palasz-Rutkowska and Andrzej T. Romer (Warsaw, 1996). See also Frank W.
Thackeray, "Pilsudski, Dmowski, and the Russo-Japanese War: An Episode in the Diplomacy of a Stateless
People," in Eastern Europe and the West, ed. John Morison (New York, 1992), 52-68.
18Neal Ascherson, The Struggles for Poland (London, 1987), 40.
56 David Crowley
this failure prompted a shift within the PPS, with its leadership putting its back behind the
antiwar demonstrations being organized by workers' groups.19 Militant demonstrations
against the war?accompanied by repression by the police?were powerful ways of further
inscribing the image of Russian injustice in the minds of the Poles.
Understanding the motivating force of images, whether of the textual or visual kind,
the Polish Left invested much energy into propaganda. The war years saw a surge of short
lived underground newspapers such as the PPS's Nowe Zycie (New Life) in Russian Poland,
as well as others issued by the legal socialist party in Austrian Poland (Polska Partia Socjalno
Demokratyczna Galicji i Sla^ska Cieszynskiego, or PPSD), such as Liberum Veto, which
was smuggled across the border to Russian Poland. The artists working for these illustrated
titles made good use of new graphic techniques?rippling abstract lines of energy associated
with Art Nouveau?to deliver a powerful emotional punch and to signal commitment to
progress. Witold Wojtkiewicz, a young Krak?w-based artist, was regularly commissioned
by Liberum Veto and other satirical magazines throughout 1904 and 1905 to comment on
the Russo-Japanese War and the strikes and demonstrations which erupted in Krakow during
the revolutionary months that followed.20 His ironic commentary developed as events took
their course in the Far East. Early images attacked official rhetoric about Russia's historic
colonization of the East and her indifference to the fate of Polish and Jewish soldiers on the
"holy" battlefields sanctified by the tsar's priests. After the conflict had drawn to an end
following the Treaty of Portsmouth (September 1905), Wojtkiewicz turned to the tragic
consequences of war. In a late drawing entitled "Slawa" ("Glory") produced for a PPSD
satirical periodical, for instance, Wojtkiewicz depicted a "Russian hero" back from the
East as a one-legged skeleton with his arm strapped to a rifle, decorated with military
crosses and medals (fig. 3). The world?viewed through Wojtkiewicz's eyes?was populated
by figures wearing grotesque masks, children playing out adult roles, and amorphous,
threatening crowds. Unlike the left-wing imagery which filled the pages of the socialist
press?a banal lexicon of radiant angels, rising suns, and muscular workers snapping free
of their chains?Wojtkiewicz's symbolism was enigmatic and filled with foreboding. This
effect was heightened by his extraordinary drawing technique which, in its expressive force,
seemed like a cry of rage.
Wojtkiewicz was not the only modernist artist with connections with the PPS. Before
making his long journey to Japan via New York and San Francisco, PPS leader Pilsudski
had been on another mission. In March 1904 he went in person to the dilapidated home of
Stanislaw Wyspianski, a modernist poet, dramatist, and artist living in Krakow in the Austrian
partition. He went to secure the artist's support for his scheme to raise a Polish army.
Although terminally ill (he was to die in 1907 at the age of 38), Wyspianski was widely
acknowledged as a powerful moral force and had, in fact, been proclaimed as a "national
bard."21 In receiving this decoration, he stepped into the shoes of earlier romantic poets,

20Witold Wojtkiewicz: Miedzy ironiq. a melancholia, exhibition catalogue issued by the Muzeum &l^skie w
Katowicach (Katowice, May 1999).
21On Wyspianski's career and oeuvre see Zdzislaw K^pinski, Stanislaw Wyspianski (Warsaw, 1984); T.
Terlecki, Stanislaw Wyspianski (Boston, 1983); E. Miodonska-Brookes, ed., Stanislaw Wyspianski. Studium
artysty - Materialy z sesji naukowej na Uniwersytecie Jagiellonskim (Krakow 1996); and Waldemar Okon,
Stanislaw Wyspianski (Wroclaw, 2001).
most notably Adam Mickiewicz, author of the epic Pan Tadeusz (1834) and a tragic figure
who lived his life in exile and died suddenly of cholera in Constantinople in 1855 while
attempting to raise a regiment of Poles to serve against Russia. In his symbolist art, designs
for stained glass, poems, and plays, Wyspianski had made national history his chief theme,
though often from a critical viewpoint, pointing to the hubris of romantic nationalism.
Messianistic myths had left the Poles passive, hoping for miracles: his self-appointed role?
confirmed by his national "investiture"?was to provoke the nation into action. In seeking
Wyspianski's support, Pilsudski sought to tap his status and remind the Poles of their history
of militant struggle. In fact, it appears that the PSS even wanted Wyspianski to take up
Fig. 3 Witold Wojtkiewicz, "Glory" cartoon published in Hrabia Wojtek, 1906 (reproduced
from J?zef Kozlowski, Proletariacka Mioda Polska [Warsaw, 1986]).
58 David Crowley
arms to signal the beginning of an armed uprising.22 But in an unintended echo of

Mickiewicz's fate fifty years earlier, the symbolist artist was too ill to fulfil his destiny as a
soldier-poet.
"He welcomed us into his flat in Krowoderska Street," wrote an eyewitness to the
meeting between the veteran of Romanov jails and the ailing artist, "into a sort of 'day
room' which overlooked the Ko^ciuszko Mound with a view as subtle as a Japanese silk
print." Wyspianski, he continued,
listened with all his concentration, asked questions about some details without
saying much for his part. He found the military preparations right and necessary,
but found himself unable to cooperate actively ... he was ready to support the
purchase of arms with a series of his landscape drawings and lithographs of his
drawing of the Virgin Mary of Cz^stochowa. ... Pilsudski was against accepting
such a personal donation from Wyspianski for the needs of the insurgents. He
desired something else: that the poet would impose certain ideas upon the nation,
influence the morale of the people who were about to fight.23
Pilsudski's misunderstanding was as much to do with art as it was politics. Wyspianski's

offer of a series of landscape drawings was intended as a political gesture, albeit one which
eschewed the lofty rhetoric desired by the politician.
Despite the indifferent response to his proposal, Wyspianski set to work in December
1904 and the early months of 1905 on a small series of views from his studio on the west of
the city, of which at least thirteen are known dispersed today in private collections and
museums. They depict views of KoSciuszko Mound in pastel (and return to a theme which
he had first represented as a chromolithograph in 1902) (fig. 4). Untitled, they are captioned
with dates and times of the day like a visual diary, a fact emphasised by the artist when he
exhibited them in Warsaw with these "titles" in 1905. In art historical terms they have been
conventionally connected to Wyspianski's condition and described as "elegiac" works
concerned with passing of time and death.24 This reading has been reinforced by the bleak
wintery conditions devoid of life captured in some of the drawings (though not all). However,
as Agnieszka Morawinska has demonstrated, they should be understood in close relation to
the political events of the day, a reading reinforced by the witness's description of the view
as being as "subtle as a Japanese silk print."25 Wyspianski's inspiration here is less likely to
have been a silk print than a famous set of woodblock ukiyoe from the 1830s by Katsushika
Hokusai. His "Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji" series presents the iconic image of the
Japanese mountain as a constant feature in a landscape changing according to the seasons.
Like Hokusai's ukiyoe, Wyspianski's drawings adopted different viewpoints (perspectives
offered by the different windows in the artist's flat) and abbreviated perspectives. While
the weather and light conditions change dramatically, the mound is a steady presence.
22Stefan Zeromski, "Na Brori," in Wyspianski w oczach wsp?lczesnych , ed. Leon Ploszewski (Krakow,
1971), 220.
23Sokolnicki, cited by Marta Romanowska, "Singing of the Nation: Invocation of the Holy Ghost Wyspianski"s
Veni Creator Hymn," in By Force or by Will, ed. Jeremy Howard (St Andrews, 2002), 79.
24K$piriski, Stanislaw Wyspianski, 164-69.
25Agnieszka Morawiriska, "A View From the Window," Canadian-American Slavic Studies 21 (Summer
1987): 57-77.
Fig. 4 Stanislaw Wyspianski, View of the Ko&iuszko Mound, 1904 (courtesy of the National
Museum Krakow).
60 David Crowley
But while Mount Fuji represented "eternal Japan," the Kogciuszko Mound pointed to
something rather more recent in origin (fig. 5).26 The thirty-four-meter-high man-made
memorial barrow had been constructed on the edge of Krakow in 1820 in homage to the
leader of a national uprising against the tsar. General Tadeusz Kogciuszko was widely
viewed as a national hero of the first rank for unifying Poland against her enemies, even if
his fate was ultimately one of failure. The mound was capped with a piece of granite from
the Tatra mountains which had historically marked Poland's southern border and contained
soil from the site of the battle of Raclawice where in 1794 the Russians had been defeated
with the aid of peasants armed with scythes (as well as from the battlefields of the American
War of Independence in which KoSciuszko also fought). At the time that Wyspianski made
his series of drawings, the significance of this melancholic symbol of national valor was
overshadowed by the fact that it had been fortified by the Austrian authorities and functioned
as a barracks.
Fig. 5 Early twentieth-century postcard depicting the Kosciuszko Mound (with two pre
Christian mounds in the background) (private collection).
In Wyspianski's series of drawings, events from the past and the present were connected:
Polish militancy in the past and present was connected to the war in the East. Nevertheless,
the meaning of this association remains ambiguous: alongside sunny images of the landscape
in thaw, images of snows and frosts carry symbolic resonance which accords with
Wyspianski's critical view of the martyrological myths in Polish romanticism. While
Wyspianski offered the drawings for sale to raise funds for the cause of Polish militancy,
they also signalled his doubts.
26Janina Bienarz?wna and Jan M. Malecki, Dzieje Krakowa: Krakow w latach 1786-1918 (Krak?w, 1979),
59-60.
In the "Views of the KoSciuszko Mound," Wyspianski made an allegorical connection

between Poland and Japan. Others drew more explicit connections between the two nations
in Russia's shadow. Chief among these commentators was Feliks Jasiefiski, the most
prominent interpreter of Japanese culture and life in Polish society at the time. Son of a
wealthy gentry family, he made Warsaw his home in the 1880s after travelling widely
throughout Europe and the Middle East. His primary activities were as a collector and as
patron of art. Jasiefiski established strong contacts with modern artists, first in Warsaw and
then in Krakow where he was given the epithet "Maggha." Jasienski regarded his extensive
collection of Japanese art as a kind of didactic instrument to stimulate the arts. There are
many accounts of Polish artists borrowing items in his collection and, in fact, Mehoffer's
painting which opens this discussion almost certainly depicts his objects. Moreover,
Jasienski purchased one of Wyspianski's views of the KoSciuszko Mound.27 His promotion
of Japanese art was not just a matter of practical aesthetics: he saw his efforts in national
terms. Of the exhibitions he curated, he said "I have shown you Japan to teach you to think
about Poland, thus following in the footsteps of artists who have thought about Japan in a
Japanese style for over two thousand years."28
Jasiefiski was the author of a monumental, if somewhat sprawling, book, Manggha:
Promenade ? trovers le monde, I 'art et les idees (1901). Adopting the format of the chronicle
developed by the Goncourt Brothers in France, this book is a diverse collection of sketches,
essays, and recollections including many observations about Japan. Despite his confident
pronouncements about that distant society, it appears that he did not travel there. His
knowledge had been acquired through the writings of others and by reflection on his extensive
collection of Japanese artefacts. Jasiefiski saw in this art a model of society where common
things of utility made and used by people were more beautiful than luxuries accessible only
to the rich. Moreover, the role of "national art" of this kind was not to stir hysterical
passions but to speak of the nation through the high qualities of its cultural products.29 This
was Japan viewed through a Polish mirror. In reflecting Japan's virtues, he commented on
Polish "failings" (in this case the conscription of art by politics).
Jasiefiski's diverse collection had three main aspects: ukiyoe prints and decorative art
from the Far East, purchased through European dealers; contemporary modern Polish art,
sometimes acquired by exchange for Japanese prints; and historic Polish decorative art,
largely centered on tapestries and ecclesiastical robes. Among the latter were "sarmatian"
textiles from the period of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. These antiques included
a number of seventeenth-century silk sashes with gold threads made with geometrical and
floral Persian patterns made by Armenians living in Poland. Worn with a kontusz, a garment
with slit sleeves, these sashes were a central element in the noble dress of the day.
They belong to a long-standing self-orientalizing tradition in Polish culture, that of
27For Jasiefiski's account of meeting Wyspianski while the artist was producing these works see Ewa
Miodoriska-Brookes, ed., Feliks Jasienski ijego Manggha (Krakow, 1992), 336.
28Jasienski, cited in Kossokowski Inspiracje Sztukq. Japonii (n.p.).
29See Miodonska-Brookes' introduction and Jasienski's own comments in Feliks Jasienski ijego Manggha,
20-21, 345-48.
62 David Crowley
Sarmatism.30 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Polish nobility believed
themselves?erroneously?to be direct descendents of the ancient Sarmatians, a nomadic
tribe originating in Asia who later resettled in northeastern Europe. Possessed of mythic
skills as horsemen and as warriors, the Sarmatians represented the epitome of independence.
This potent fantasy, argued Zdzislaw Zygulski,
assured the gentry a privileged position and justified its dominance in state
government. It was the members of the gentry alone who enjoyed unlimited
personal freedom, the "golden freedom"; furthermore, the myth gave rise to their
self-adulation, xenophobia, and megalomania along with a belief in their historic
mission and ... orientalization of their customs and aesthetic tastes.31
The Sarmatian myth was materialized in clothes, weaponry, and even hairstyles, usually as
a fusion of European and Turkish forms, as well as in a taste for luxury. According to
national mythology, they loved to parade their wealth in extravagant possessions, as well as
in bulimic bouts of hospitality.32
The ideal image of the Sarmatian noble was that of a figure who combined gallantry
on the battlefield with great patronage of the arts. This warrior tribe had been widely
revered throughout the nineteenth century, in part to bolster Polish belief in national
"characteristics" of independence and resistance in the face of repression.33 Operating
within the chaotic "golden freedom," whereby each noble claimed the right to resist the
authority of the king or the city, the historical image of Sarmatian culture provided a model
for Polish militancy. Parallels with this mythic construction were to be found in contemporary
representations of Japan. In his essays, Jasienski describes the Japanese nation as "exquisite
heroes" (wywtornych bohater?w) and the ordinary Japanese man as a "knight-artist" (rycerz
artystd)?4 It hardly needs noting here that the figure of the calligrapher-samurai also had
an analogue in recent Polish history, not least in the figure of Mickiewicz.
The sarmatian warrior almost found his way onto the battlefields of the Russo-Japanese
War in 1905. The socialist novelist Stefan Zeromski, for instance, imagined in rather
overwrought prose the corpse of the Polish soldier on the charnel-grounds of the East.35
Here, according to Zeromski, was transparent evidence of the cynicism which underlay
imperial pan-Slavic rhetoric. The writer called for poets to cover his naked body "lacking
its gold sash and red kontusz," with a "dignified cloak, fashioned from the wonderful colors
of art." The invocation of Sarmatism alongside descriptions of the honor and selflessness
30See Zdzislaw Zygulski, "The Impact of the Orient on the Culture of Old Poland," in Jan K. Ostrowski et
al., Land of the Winged Horseman: Art in Poland , trans. Krystyna Malcharek (Baltimore, 1999), 69-79. See
also Stanislaw Grzybowski, Sarmatyzm (Warsaw 1996).
3'Ostrowski, Land of the Winged Horseman, 70.
32Maria Bogucka, The Lost World of the "Sarmatians" (Warsaw, 1996), 111-24.
33In the 1880s the Sarmatian culture of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was popularized by Henryk
Sienkiewicz in his trilogy Ogniem i mieczem (With Fire and Sword, 1884), Potop (Deluge, 1886), and Pan
Wolodyjowski (1888).
34Jasieriski, Manggha, 345-46.
35Stefan Zeromski, "Sen o Szpadie," in 1905 w Literaturze Polskiej, ed. Stefan Klonowski (Warsaw, 1955),
202-4.
of the combatants from the Japanese ranks served to bolster what Zeromski called the
"heroism" (bohaterstwo) of both nations.
It should be stressed that Japan?distant and incontestable?was pictured in ways that
ultimately reflected the worldview of the imagining subject rather than imagined object.
The appeal for Jasienski and Zeromski was the image of a society which combined art,
honor, and tradition, whereas for Polish modernizers cast in the positivist mold it was the
rapid economic and social transformations following the Meiji Restoration which struck a
chord. Warsaw's leading newspaper columnist of the period, Boleslaw Prus, held the latter
view. From the 1870s his weekly newspaper columns had keenly pressed the case for the
"improvement" of Polish society. He was the best-known advocate of Positivism, a political
philosophy designed to maintain Polish economic and cultural life in the face of campaigns
of assimilation and political repression.36 In 1890 he had written that
the Japanese for several thousand years had been a very backward people. They
had no locomotives, print, or electricity. They ate rats and beef with equal relish;
they did not dress in practical fashions and reckoned themselves to be the most
excellent nation under the sun. But twenty or thirty years ago they decided to
become civilized and they achieved that goal. Today they have trousers, ships
with propellers, and rifles; they have telegraphs, steam engines, journalists,
police?everything that a civilized nation requires.37
Imperial Japan appeared?from Prus's perspective?to have vaulted history, becoming

modern in ways that the Poles, mired in romantic retrospection and inhibited by foreign
domination, should envy.
Not surprisingly, Prus returned to the theme of "Japan and the Japanese" in 1905.
Drawing on press reports of the war as well as the wave of new studies and translations
published in Poland in the first years of the new century, he presented a picture of the
values necessary for a society capable of beating its neighbor.38 These lay in valor, sacrifice,
and hard work: all principles which the Poles should emulate. On January 22,1905 (a date
written in history as "Bloody Sunday"), he wrote that "the Japanese have not only attracted
attention thanks to their victories, but also thanks to their extraordinary merits which even
Russians admire in them. The opinion of a friend may be pleasant, but the respect of an
enemy confirms the real values.... Such a nation deserves not only a closer look, but must
also serve as a model for study."39
This 1905 report by Prus appeared in Tygodnik Ilustrowany (Illustrated Weekly).
Following a format established in Britain and elsewhere in the mid-nineteenth century, this
36Stanislaus A. Blejwas, Realism in Polish Politics: Warsaw Positivism and National Survival in Nineteenth
Century Poland (New Haven, 1984).
37Boleslaw Prus, Kurier Codzienny (June 8, 1890), in his Kroniki, ed. Zygmunt Szweykowski, vol. 12
(Warsaw, 1962), 235.
38These works include A. Okszyc, Japonia i Japonczycy Kilka wrazen i rozmyslan z podrozy na Daleki
Wsch?d (Warsaw, 1904); S. Posner, Japonia: Panstwo i prawo (Warsaw, 1905); Juliusz Starkel, Obrazki z
Japonii (Warsaw, 1904); Wladyslaw Studnicki, Japonia (Lw?w, 1904); and E. B., Japonja, kraj i ludzie
(Warsaw, 1904).
39Prus, Tygodnik Ilustrowany (January 22, 1905) in Kroniki, vol. 18 (Warsaw 1968), 58.
64 David Crowley
weekly was first published in Warsaw in 1859. Each week, its readers became eyewitnesses
to the triumphs and disasters of the age. Its remarkable popularity was achieved not only
by presenting compelling visual images of spectacular events like the first airplane flights
or natural disasters: it also sought to satisfy the considerable appetite for patriotic stories.40
In 1904 the editor introduced a regular column, "From the Far East," to cover the Russo
Japanese War. To accommodate the interests of the Russian censors, the war had to be
reported in largely in matter-of-fact terms. Readers were presented in with detailed
discussions of the mechanism of a Russian carbine; accounts of the numbers of troops in
the Japanese ranks; bird's-eye views of fortifications around Port Arthur; or the slow progress
of the Baltic Fleet sailing around the world toward its destruction in the Straits of Tushima
in May 1905. Japanese militarism was accompanied by descriptions of everyday life.
Reviewing Klo^nik's 1904 book, Japonia, the editors of the Tygodnik noted that "war has
engendered in us a special phenomenon"; that is, a fascination with all things Japanese.41
To satisfy this interest, the weekly published accounts of Japanese art, dress, social
conventions, attitudes to nature and geography, folk legends, as well as serious-minded
reports into the organization of the Japanese economy While many of these reports traded
Western cliches about the East (Lafcadio Hearn being a frequent guide), the weekly's authors
usually eschewed moral judgment or caricature.42
The sober tone of such reports is, in retrospect, deceptive?as it was intended to be.
Although explicit endorsement of the enemy could not be broached in the way that some of
the tsar's opponents might have wished (such texts were written and circulated, but were
usually published pseudonymously in the Austrian partition, where greater press freedom
was enjoyed), they were not neutral.43 Here a distinction should be drawn between the
visual and textual representations of the conflict. Tygodnik Ilustrowany went, as its title
suggests, to great lengths to provide compelling images of the Far East. The intensity of
the land and sea battles was captured in the magazine's illustrations, while the steady lens
of the camera was used to record the everyday routines of the Japanese people. Strikingly
many of these images were recorded?both graphically and photographically?"behind
the lines," which is to say that they adopted the viewing position of the Japanese reader
(and some were acknowledged as copies of Japanese drawings). Interested readers were
invited into Japanese shops with their bold calligraphic signs and mysterious baskets of
produce. Turning the page, they were presented with dramatic illustrations of Japanese
troops straining to get heavy artillery into position while under fire from Russian guns.
Adopting the conventional visual rhetoric of muscular heroism by populating the Japanese
forces with bold officers, loyal troops, and the noble dead, the war images form a striking
contrast with the caricatural depictions of Japan which feature in conservative Russian
40Beth Holmgren, Rewriting Capitalism: Literature and the Market in Late Tsarist Russia and the Kingdom
of Poland (Pittsburgh, 1998), 150-77.
4lTygodnik llustrowany 44 (November 29, 1904): 831.
42J. K., "USmiech Japonczyka," Tygodnik llustrowany 48 (November 26, 1904): 922-23.
43See J?zef Kozlowski, Proletariacka Mloda Polska: Sztuki Plastyczne i Ich Tw?rcy w Zycie Proletariatu
Polskiego 1878-1914 (Warsaw, 1986). Kozlowski surveys much of the publishing output during the
revolutionary months of 1905 and in the years that followed, most of which was produced in Galicia (Austrian
Poland).
publications of the period (fig. 6). Unable to celebrate victories on the battlefield, as Yulia
Mikhailova has argued, the Russian press took to diminishing Japan as a land of "tiny doll
like people" predestined to fail in their attempts to contest the Russian giant.44 To bolster
the broken Russian ego, contemporary commentators claimed for Russia the role of defender
of Europe: "Japan is a representative of the idea of Pan-Mongolism?the unification of the
people of that [yellow] stock against the white race.... Russia is an obstacle for realization
of Japanese government's plans. ... Russia must stay on guard of the European interests
from the encroachment of the yellow race."45 While the Russians were busy representing
their interests as Western ones, it is no coincidence that the Poles were actively exchanging
"oriental" ones.
Fig. 6 Anon., "Artillery being put into position above Port Arthur," illustration from Tygodnik
Ilustrowany, 1904 (private collection).
On the pages of Tygodnik Ilustrowany such exchanges were often coded. In a culture
circumscribed by censorship and repression, the Poles were well versed in what novelist
Eliza Orzeszkowa termed "prison language." "No date, no thing concerning the national
struggle and suffering is given by name," she wrote in 1887, "yet we understand each
other?my reader and I?perfectly."46 The possibilities of allegorical writing and reading
can be illustrated with a page from a December 1904 issue of Tygodnik Ilustrowany which
features a letter from an injured Polish officer from the Eighth Eastern Siberian Reserve
Battalion recuperating in a Verkhneudinsk (today Ulan-ude) hospital. In his letter to the
editor, he asks readers to send Polish-language books to soldiers conscripted in the Russian
"Yulia Mikhailova, "Japan and Russia: Mutual Images, 1904-39," http://www.intl.hiroshima-cu.ac.jp/~yulia/

publ/japrus.htm (last accessed September 20, 2005).
45Voronov, Borba zheltoi i beloi rasy (Moscow 1904), 78, cited by Mikhailova, "Japan and Russia."
46Eliza Orzeszkowa, cited by John Bates, "Poland," in Censorship: A World Encyclopedia, ed. Derek Jones
(London, 2001), 3:1882-95.
66 David Crowley
forces who, like him, face a diet of "many Russian books from St. Petersburg" (a complaint
shared by Polish teachers and school children during these years of strikes). At the same
time, he also requests small images of the "Black Madonna" of Cz^stochowa, the symbolic
"Queen of Poland" (and one of the themes considered by Wyspianski as the subject of a
print to raise funds for Polish insurgency in 1904). The political symbolism of this petition
would have been clear to the Polish reader. The Black Madonna is a painting which was
ritually crowned in 1717 in protest against Peter the Great's growing hold over Poland.
Threatened by strong Russian army, the Silent Sejm, as the parliamentary session of
February 1, 1717, is known, had no choice but to agree to the dismantling of the Polish
Commonwealth. The Marian icon was made?by this act of coronation?into a sign of
opposition. While the injured soldier's evocation of the contemporary struggles over the
Polish language as well as the nation's history of suffering at the hands of her neighbor is
notable, the position of the text by the editor warrants further comment. It appeared next to
an image depicting injured soldiers being treated in a Japanese hospital. In placing a letter
from a Polish injured soldier next to an image of their Japanese counterparts, the editors of
the Tygodnik confused the conventional moral economy of war. Enemy and comrade-in
arms were treated with equivalence.
The source of some of the images and reports of everyday life published in Tygodnik
Ilustrowany warrants a final comment. Many of the ordinary images of the Far East were
supplied by Polish orientalists. Waclaw Sieroszewski, a Polish socialist who had visited
Japan in September 1903, travelling from Aomori to Nagasaki via the major cities en route,
provided images of streets and shops as well as children and peasants (fig. 7). Sieroszewski,
like a number of the earliest Polish interpreters of Japanese culture, was driven East in
different circumstances than those enjoyed by their better-known counterparts like Lafcadio
Hearn.47 The Polish perspective on Japan was often viewed?literally and imaginatively?
from the Russian penal colony of Sakhalin, an island ceded by Japan to Russia in 1875 and
partly regained as a consequence of the Russo-Japanese War. Located off Russia's Far
Eastern coast, Sakhalin was home to both a large convict community and different indigenous
groups including the Ainu. Many Poles had been imprisoned on this island penal colony
for conspiring against tsarist rule. One of Poland's earliest and best known Japanists, for
instance, Bronislaw Pifsudski (brother of the PPS leader) had been sentenced to exile in
1887 for an abortive attempt to assassinate Tsar Aleksander III. On his release in 1899 he
was employed by the museum of the Society for the Study of the Amur Region in Vladivostok.
Thousands of miles from home, such Poles were placed in an ambiguous position. They
were both victims of the Russian penal system, yet they were sometimes employed?as
well educated prisoners (Pilsudski had been a law student at St. Petersburg University at
the time of his incarceration)?to "improve" the Eastern fringes of the Russian Empire. In
1902, three years after completing his sentence and living in Vladivostock, Pilsudski was,
for instance, requested by the military governor of Sakhalin Oblast to undertake a study of
the Ainu so that new regulations for their governance could be prepared.48 He also joined
47See A. Kuczyriski, ed., Syberia w kulturze narodu polskiego (Wroclaw, 1998).

48Koichi Inoue, "B. Pilsudski's Proposals of Autonomy and Education for the Sakhalin Ainu" (n.d.), 50, pdf
version available at http://src-h.slav.hokudai.ac.jp.
an ethnographic project led by Sieroszewski for the Russian Imperial Geographic Society
to study the Ainu living on Hokkaido.49 Sieroszewski was another Pole who had first been
deported to Siberia in 1880 for his political activities. He was destined to be sent back
again when implicated in a plot to ferment national unrest in Russian Poland, but avoided
Siberia with the help of the vice-president of the Russian Imperial Geographic Society.
Fig. 7 Waclaw Sieroszewski, photograph of a street in Yokohama, reproduced in Tygodnik

Ilustrowany, 1904 (private collection).
In return he agreed to undertake the expedition to Hokkaido. Pilsudski and Sieroszewski

spent the summer of 1903 recording the voices, bodies, and lifestyle of the Ainu with wax
cylinder phonographs, cameras, and anthropometric instruments. Sieroszewski?in a
dramatic account of his time spent among the Ainu written in 1926?adds spice to the end
of their travails by describing the delivery of a letter in September 1903, at a time when
Japanese-Russian negotiations over their divergent interests in Manchuria were failing:
"The consul from Hakodate [a city on Hokkaido] wrote that on the force of orders from the
Embassy we were to break the expedition and return to Tokyo. Then I said to the saddened
Bronislaw: 'Yes! ... A war between Russia and Japan. What can it bring to Poland?!"'50
Pilsudski and Sieroszewski's experiences of Russian imperialism generated?as
Kazuhiko Sawada has argued?a strong degree of empathy for a population who were
49See A. Kuczyriski, ed., Bronistaw Pilsudski: Zeslaniec-Ethnograf-Polityk (Wroclaw, 2000).

50Waclaw Sieroszewski, "Among the Hairy People," ("Wsr?d kosmatych ludzi," trans. Alfred F. Majewicz),
in The Complete Works of Bronislaw Pilsudski, vol. 3, Materials for the Study of the Ainu Language and
Folklore 2 (New York, 1998), 699. At the end of their fieldwork, Sieroszewski returned to Europe via the
Japanese mainland and Korea, while Pilsudski joined his family in Sakhalin, staying there until the eve of the
Japanese occupation, when he too fled to Europe via the Japanese mainland.
68 David Crowley
treated with callousness by the Japanese and Russian authorities (a view perhaps confirmed
by Pilsudski's marriage to Chuhsamma, the niece of an Ainu chief).51 Viewing the world of
the Ainu, Sieroszewski nostalgically imagined Poland
among a dense Japanese population the rests of the Ainu were dotted here and
there?tiny villages of two to three houses made of reed and covered with large
reed roofs with stepping thatches so similar to Polish thatched roofs ... at that
time it was so beautiful and the houses hidden in the verdure were so picturesque
and looked so purely Polish.52
Sieroszewski also recorded his displeasure at being mistaken as a Russian official by Japanese
policeman during their mission to Hokkaido. In a surreal episode in which the sartorial
conventions of East and West were reversed, he described how
before we managed to change comfortable Japanese kimonos for our European

clothes the kakuson kocho himself appeared in our door. He stood in the "European
fashion" in his gala black police uniform with shining buttons, wearing trousers
with stripes, gaitered, with a sword. ... A normal conversation started with the
Japanese concerning our journey, the weather, our intentions related to our coming
here: ... "What are you looking for?"
"In the first place we want to learn about all Ainu gods ...," I hastened to
calm him down.
"Aha, those shaven wooden sticks inau ? ...," he laughed contemptuously
"This you can study. But you must not draw any map! ..."
"We have a Japanese one!" I replied. "Anyway, you probably received special
orders concerning us from your general governor from Sapporo? ..."
"I know everything!..." he concluded the conversation, bowing and stepping
backward toward the door. He did not know, however, anything about Poland
and in spite of our protests and explanations he called us Russians (Oros).53
The fact that these Europeans could only identify with a native people caught between
two large and aggressive neighbors without the protection of the legal apparatus of the
nation is not surprising. Japanese policies during the Meiji period had outlawed the Ainu's
language and restricted farming to government-controlled plots. The Ainu also were
employed in conditions approaching slavery in the Japanese fishing industry.54 Pilsudski
and Sieroszewski may have imagined their own indentured status as Poles in similar terms.
While these reports might well be criticized as empty pathos which obscured their actual
actions on behalf of Russia, they point to a more general imaginative capacity to see oneself
as the Other. Here one senses a connection to the theory of Orientalism supplied by Edward
Said. "Many early oriental amateurs began by welcoming the Orient as a salutary
derangement of the European habits of mind and spirit," he wrote in his classic critique of
the phenomenon. "The Orient was overvalued for its pantheism, its spirituality, it stability,
5lKazuhiko Sawada, "Bronislaw Pitsudski and Futabatei Shimei," paper presented at the Third International
Conference on Bronislaw Pilsudski and His Scholarly Heritage, Krakow and Zakopane, 1999.
52Sieroszewski, "Among the Hairy People," 664, 669.
53Ibid, 674.
54David Luke Howell, Geographies of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Japan (Berkeley, 2005), esp. chap. 7.
its longevity, its primitivism, and so forth.... Yet almost without exception such over esteem
was followed by a counterresponse: the Orient suddenly appeared lamentable, under
humanised, antidemocratic, backward, barbaric, and so forth."55 In the particular
circumstance in which these socialist Poles found themselves, as both of victim and agents
of imperialism, their affirmation of Ainu life was perhaps one of Said's exceptions. In fact,
the peculiar conditions of the Russo-Japanese War meant that many different Poles engaged
in many imaginative acts of self-orientalization not, it should be stressed, with the Ainu but
with Japan. This idea connects the sketch of a snowy landscape with shouting "banzai!" on
Warsaw's streets or the arrangement of images and text on the pages of a popular magazine.
Unlike the most bellicose quarters in the Russian press which sought to heighten artificial
distinctions between Japan and Europe, the Poles displayed a keen ability to imagine
themselves as the Other.
But, of course, a key difference has to be drawn here. While Sieroszewski and
Pilsudski's encounters were framed by actual experiences of Japan (not least in the petty
bureaucracy of everyday life), their compatriots in the artists' studios of Krakow or the
streets of Warsaw held a view of Japan that was uninhibited by facts or experience. In their
minds, the Far East?a loose concept?could seem contiguous with another collapsed
geographical entity, Poland. Denied physical form or political institutions, Poland could
be imagined in any form: unrooted by borders, it could occupy an imagined space between
East and West. Their acts of self-orientalization were based on an idealization of Japan
that was rooted in fantasy: not perhaps "an exquisite fancy of art" as Wilde had described
aesthetic Japonisme, but a political one connected to the hopes for national reunion triggered
by the Russo-Japanese War. Moreover, Japan was an improving mirror which could be
used to reflect Polish virtues, whether real or, more typically, desired. And, as such, the
realities of Japan's aggressive imperialism and militarism remained largely overlooked.
Only those very few?like Sieroszewski and Pilsudski?with direct experience of Japan as
an imperial state could see the symmetry between the principal combatants in the Russo
Japanese War.
55Edward Said, Orientalism (London, 1978), 150.

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Seeing Japan, Imagining Poland: Polish Art and the Russo-Japanese War

Author(s): David Crowley

The Russian Review 67 (January 2008): 50-69

In the interior of a private museum containing a valuable collection of a lover of

Madwiga Mehoffer, cited by Kossokowski, Inspiracje Sztukq Japonii (n,p.).

after cleaning a room cluttered with chinoiserie (chinszczyzna) and japonaiserie

Fig. 2 "National march" by Poles in Warsaw, November 5, 1905. This demonstration

13Kalabinski and Tych, Czwarte powstanie czy pierwsza rewolucja? 55.

19Blobaum, Rewolucja, 49.

arms to signal the beginning of an armed uprising.22 But in an unintended echo of

Pilsudski's misunderstanding was as much to do with art as it was politics. Wyspianski's

In the "Views of the KoSciuszko Mound," Wyspianski made an allegorical connection

Imperial Japan appeared?from Prus's perspective?to have vaulted history, becoming

"Yulia Mikhailova, "Japan and Russia: Mutual Images, 1904-39," http://www.intl.hiroshima-cu.ac.jp/~yulia/

47See A. Kuczyriski, ed., Syberia w kulturze narodu polskiego (Wroclaw, 1998).

Fig. 7 Waclaw Sieroszewski, photograph of a street in Yokohama, reproduced in Tygodnik

In return he agreed to undertake the expedition to Hokkaido. Pilsudski and Sieroszewski

49See A. Kuczyriski, ed., Bronistaw Pilsudski: Zeslaniec-Ethnograf-Polityk (Wroclaw, 2000).

before we managed to change comfortable Japanese kimonos for our European

55Edward Said, Orientalism (London, 1978), 150.

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